STUDENTS LEAD ANTI-RACISM EFFORTSGraduate students are organizing to support the Black Lives Matter movement

16 minutes, one minute for each
bullet that hit Chicago teen
Laquan MacDonald, killed by a
police officer in 2014.

In Chicago, more than 50

students protested in front of
City Hall.

“It was a very emotionalexperience,” says Kia Watkins,a graduate student at theAdler School of ProfessionalPsychology who participated inthe event. “It was a cold day. Itstarted raining. Not all of thereaction we got [from passersby]was positive. But we remindedourselves of the bigger pictureand what it meant.”At the convention, the

#psychologists4blacklives leaders
discussed expanding a die-in
protest to more schools next year.

“I believe social justice and
advocating for our clients outside
of the therapy room is a very logical and natural progression from
the APA ethical requirement of
advocating for our clients within
therapy,” says organizer Luciano
Lima, a doctoral student at the
Illinois School of Professional
Psychology in Chicago. “We
don’t want to just heal the
wounds of the patients we’re
seeing, but also help prevent the
wounds from happening in the
first place.” ■

Hundreds of students and psychologists gathered at APA’s 2016 Annual
Convention in Denver for a
march in solidarity with the
Black Lives Matter movement.

Their goal was to bring attention to racial discrimination and
the police shootings of African-Americans and to encourage
psychologists and APA to support the Black Lives Matter
movement.

“We sincerely feel that while
APA has done some great things
to support research, programs
and outreach that draw attention to discrimination, stress
and police brutality, more can
and still needs to be done,”
said a mission statement from
the organizers, who are psychology graduate students at
Arizona State University and the
University of Kentucky.

Also at APA’s convention,
student activists held workshops and panels to discuss the
movement and to plan future
events. Students from the group
Eradicate #BostonCollege
Racism, for example, presented
a toolkit they developed to help
those on other campuses start
their own anti-racism groups
(see the November 2015
grad-PSYCH for more on Eradicate

#BostonCollegeRacism).

The march and conventionprogramming were among themost recent examples of howgraduate students are leadingsupport for the Black LivesMatter movement in psychol-ogy and on campuses. Earlierthis year, on the anniversary ofMartin Luther King Jr.’s assas-sination, psychology graduatestudents at 20 schools across thecountry staged die-in protestscoordinated around the Twitterhashtag #psychologists4black-lives. At each event, they laydown in public places—univer-sity quads, libraries and dininghalls and on city hall steps—for